


Sessions

by aeternamente



Series: Time and Space [4]
Category: Nothing Much to Do
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-08
Updated: 2014-08-08
Packaged: 2018-02-12 08:17:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2102259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeternamente/pseuds/aeternamente
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes you just play. You play something that takes your mind of things, or something that reflects how you feel. You let yourself unwind to the repeated motions—the strumming, the cycling chord changes. Sometimes, when you’re trying to work out something in your head, lyrics come out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sessions

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [If I Didn't, Darlin'](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/66624) by Reuben Hudson. 



> Okay, so this one is partially canonballed, as it references a part of the Benaddicktion ep. "HYPOTHETICALLY" in which Pedro uses the word "flaming" in a way that sounded to my American ears like it had some homophobic undertones. Turns out, the word "flaming" doesn't have the same connotations in New Zealand, as some of the Candle Wasters pointed out in [this post](http://aeternamente.tumblr.com/post/94067638002/prettyfaroutman-oh-wow-thank-you-so-much-for).
> 
> But I still think it's a valid point that Pedro has exhibited a pretty heteronormative attitude throughout the series and that's gonna come back to bite him in the ass eventually. Anyway, if this whole series continues to be otherwise canon-compliant and I want to continue writing fics in it, I may change this one, but I kinda feel like I've stuck my neck out with far enough with the progression of the Pedrazar ship that it's likely to be canonballed pretty soon, so...
> 
> I guess for now this is what it is.

**Session One:** Verse One, Pre-Chorus

Sometimes you just play. You play something that takes your mind of things, or something that reflects how you feel. You let yourself unwind to the repeated motions—the strumming, the cycling chord changes. Sometimes, when you’re trying to work out something in your head, lyrics come out.

_I don’t think it’s always me who cannot see  
_ _I thought you’d notice what caused this change in me_

It’s a good start. You write it down.

You continue cycling through the chords and thinking. It’s a little hard to believe a person can really be as thick as Pedro has been over the past week. But part of your problem has always been that he’s almost certainly completely straight, and even if he isn’t, he certainly  _believes_  he’s completely straight, and sees the world in straight-people-vision. You cycle through another round of chords, and some more lyrics form themselves. You write those down too.

_And that you’d understand what made me drop my head  
_ _The connection between this and what you said_

"The song’s hilarious Balthy! You always know how to make me laugh."

Yep. Hilarious. Obviously, when your friend of the same gender as yourself writes a song about you in which he muses over the idea of you falling in love with some  _unnamed person_ , it must be a joke. It has to be, because otherwise he might be hinting that he himself is in love with you, and that couldn’t possibly be true. No, because everyone in the world is straight like you.

You break out of the verse’s chord cycle and strike a Bb7 chord.

_But I can’t say these things, darlin’, when you’re here  
It wouldn’t be right, darlin’, no it wouldn’t be fair_

You feel like you’ve been muted. Maybe it would have been better to just tell your feelings to his face, and then at least it would be out there, but now, after being more cautious and dropping hints in a song, you’re faced with plenty of evidence that if you were more forthcoming, you’d only be met with rejection, with  _you’re one of my closest friends and I care about you, but I just don’t like guys in that way_. Then he’d have to feel guilty about turning you down. You’d both have to pretend nothing happened.

The chorus should come next, but you don’t really have anything left for it. You set your guitar on its stand and pick up your English homework instead…

* * *

  **Session Two:**  Chorus, Verse Two

_If I didn’t love you_   
_If I didn’t love you_

Coming home on Monday afternoon, the songwriting bug was in your veins again. You’re jittery and unsettled, and just an hour ago…

…just an hour ago you nearly kissed him. It very nearly happened. Was there really a moment when he wanted it to happen too? It’s difficult to believe, but in that moment, it  _felt_  like he did. Then he broke eye contact and let go of your hand, and you were left wondering why you even got your hopes up.

_You may say I’d be better off, h_ _urt less and be okay  
_ _But that’s not what I want,_ _I wouldn’t have it any other way_

This is the chorus to that song you started about a week ago and abandoned after the first verse. You go back to that verse, but suddenly the rhythm’s off. You frown and spend a few minutes trying to remember how the strumming went when you wrote it.

There it is—you’ve found it, but you realize it’s considerably slower than what you’ve just come up with for the chorus. It makes sense, though. Last week, you were in a different, slower-tempo kind of mental place, and now you’ve got this overflow of nervous energy.

You fool around with trying to make the chorus slower, but that isn’t right, so you try to make the verse faster. That pre-chorus bit at the end speeds up well enough, you suppose, but the verse proper really needs that slower groove.

You’re starting to calm yourself, and going through the verse again makes you get back into the groove of those chord changes. You’re starting to be able to see past the almost-kiss, to what came before. You’d had a quick check-up with your history project partner, mostly just dividing up work because both of you work better on your own.

Then you saw Pedro in the hallway, sitting in a fetal position, head cradled in his hands. You’ve been trying to stop letting your eyes seek him out, because whenever you see him, you feel more than you want to, but when he’s directly in your path, and in obvious distress… well, what else can you do?

_I just want to help with shit you’re going through  
_ _And if I said I didn’t, darlin’, it wasn’t true_

So you sat down next to him and tried to comfort him, and only ended up making an even bigger mess. You still haven’t resolved your conflicted feelings over seeing the video Pedro posted to Ben’s channel last weekend, you only know that in the middle of all of it, even when he does shitty things, you still love him.

Which sucks.

_But there are some times when I really don’t want your help  
I feel too much guilt involving you_

You let your hand fall into your lap at the end of that line. Your pick slides out of your fingers and drops to the floor. This is just one of those songs that’ll eventually get you to the point where the subject matter just makes you sad, and you don’t really want to go on writing it. But you’ve got a chorus and two verses. You can stitch that together into a mostly complete song, weird tempo changes and everything. You’ll get around to writing the bridge eventually…

* * *

  **Session Three:**  Bridge

"Great choice of words. Really. Flaming."

You know, just in case you ever wanted evidence that Pedro Donaldson really is the straightest guy ever to have a heteronormative outlook and make homophobic jokes.

And to seriously misunderstand the word “hypothetically.”

You’ve been driven back to your guitar. Maybe you can get a decent bridge for that one almost-finished song from all of this.

You strike up a sparse, thinly voiced, descending accompaniment.

_I’m gonna be questioning the reason and rhyme to this line  
_ _Do I really want you?_

That first line is the kind of stand-in you sometimes use when you don’t know exactly what words to put in a particular place in the song. Sometimes you just talk about wondering what to write there or something like that. But you might just keep that line as-is. It kinda works for the vibe you’re going for here.

The second line… well you can work yourself up to a question like that in those moments when you’re pissed at him, when you want to yell at him, demanding to know how he thinks any of what he’s doing could possibly be a good idea. But even then, you know you’re not in any confusion over whether you want him or not.

_I’m gonna be questioning the reason and rhyme to this line  
_ _I can’t turn away from the truth_

Even just earlier today, you thought maybe things had changed. Just after school, you saw him in the hallway, and everything seemed different. For the past several days, he’d been looking at you like he’d just lost a puppy, but today, he looked at you like he’d just found a treasure.

Within the space of a few hours, you’ve become caught between a Pedro who can look at you like you’re the most captivating thing on the planet and a Pedro who can make an off-the-cuff gay joke like it’s  _nothing_. How can you know which is the real Pedro?

_I’m gonna be questioning the reason and rhyme to this line  
_ _All I really want…_

What  _do_  you want? You want the Pedro you used to have in your life. The one you could joke around with, who would come over and record you covering your favorite song, who plotted to make his friends fall in love with each other just for the hell of it, who came to your coffee shop gigs and cheered loudly for you whenever he felt like the crowd wasn’t paying enough attention.

_All I really want is to kill some time with you…_

* * *

  **Session Four:**  Verse Three

It’s late. Your head is full of the raised voices that interrupted the party, the accusations, the insults… the crisis, the flashing lights of the ambulance…

You hope Hero will pull through all right. Things looked bad when she was gasping and wheezing for breath, and Beatrice was cradling her, openly weeping, and screaming at Claudio that he’d killed her cousin.

You saw Claudio fleeing the scene, and Pedro going after him, and you really just don’t know what to think anymore.

You don’t get your guitar out. The melody has already been set anyway. You just find the lyrics sheet and scrawl out one last half-verse:

_I’d rather unrequited love than none at all  
_ _The last thing that I want to see is you to fall_


End file.
